Lawrence C.S.

C.S. LAWRENCE was born in East Africa in 1957, and spent an idyllic childhood in Nairobi and Mombasa. Eleven years later her family moved to the Middle East and she was sent to boarding school in Surrey, England. On leaving school, she attended St. Martin's School of Art in London, fully intending to pursue a career in art. However she returned to Bahrain instead and it was not until almost twenty years later when her four children were growing up that she was able to start my career as a professional artist. 

Lawrence's first exhibition in Bahrain in 1992 was a great success and all subsequent shows in Bahrain and Dubai proved to be equally rewarding. The consensus of opinion among those who appreciate her work is that her images generate a satisfying sense of serenity, of contentment in seclusion, of reflection in stillness. Often viewers will remark that they feel a strong desire to be in the places she paints, to experience the painted scene three-dimentionally. This response from viewers has always been greatly rewarding on a deeply personal level for it gives the artist a sense of shared vision.

For Lawrence, self-expression through art is an all-consuming objective. She feels driven by this creative urge within her, a compulsion that all artists can relate to. The quality of her life is contingent upon being able to paint and to perfect her art.

Her childhood experience of East Africa was so profound that even three decades later, memories of it remain intensely vivid. Her recollections of the vibrant light and brilliant colours of that landscape invariably surface time and again in her paintings. She was to discover a very similar ambiance in the landscape of the Arabian Gulf. From my many years of living there she developed a great appreciation for the Islamic aesthetic which manifests itself in Islamic architecture and design. This influence is immediately obvious in her work of that period.

Since 2002, she settled in Malta and once again found myself immersed in a landscape full of brilliant colour. The Maltese landscape has stimulated Lawrence to produce mixed-media paintings of its magnificent vistas and a new series of paintings depicting the magical antiquity of the Three Cities.

In 2009 she has expanded her portfolio to include paintings of Brighton and London.